Afghans

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has halted all asylum decisions and paused issuing visas for people traveling on Afghan passports, days after a shooting in the nation’s capital that left one National Guard member dead and another in critical condition.

Investigators continued Saturday to seek a motive in the shooting, in which the suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, faces charges including first-degree murder.

Lakanwal is a 29-year-old Afghan national who worked with the CIA during the Afghanistan war. He applied for asylum during the Biden administration, which was granted this year under President Trump, according to #AfghanEvac, a group that assists with resettlement of Afghans who helped U.S. forces in their country.

The Trump administration has seized on the shooting Wednesday several blocks from the White House to intensify efforts to rein in legal immigration, promising to pause entry from some poor countries and review Afghans and other legal migrants already in the country. That is in addition to other measures, some of which were previously set in motion.

Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died after Wednesday’s shooting, and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains hospitalized in critical condition. They were deployed with the West Virginia National Guard as part of Trump’s mission in Washington, D.C., which he says aims to combat crime. The president also has deployed or tried to deploy National Guard members to other Democratic-run cities to assist with his mass deportation efforts but has faced court challenges.

U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro’s office said the charges against Lakanwal also include two counts of assault with intent to kill while armed. In an interview on Fox News, she said there were “many charges to come.”

Asylum decisions halted

Trump called the shooting a “terrorist attack” and criticized the Biden administration for enabling entry by Afghans who worked with U.S. forces.

The director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, said Friday in a post on the social platform X that asylum decisions would be paused “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”

Experts say the U.S. has rigorous vetting systems for asylum seekers. Asylum claims made from inside the country through USCIS have long faced backlogs. Critics say the slowdown has been exacerbated during the Trump administration.

Also Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said his department was pausing “visa issuance for ALL individuals traveling on Afghan passports.”

Shawn VanDiver, president of San Diego-based #AfghanEvac, which has coordinated with the U.S. government on its Afghan resettlement efforts, said in response: “They are using a single violent individual as cover for a policy they have long planned, turning their own intelligence failures into an excuse to punish an entire community and the veterans who served alongside them.”

The suspect

Lakanwal lived in Bellingham, Wash., about 80 miles north of Seattle, with his wife and five children, former landlord Kristina Widman said.

Neighbor Mohammad Sherzad said Lakanwal was polite and quiet and spoke little English.

Sherzad said he attended the same mosque as Lakanwal and heard from other members that he was struggling to find work. He said Lakanwal “disappeared” about two weeks ago.

Lakanwal worked briefly this summer as an independent contractor for Amazon Flex, which lets people use their own cars to deliver packages, according to a company spokesperson.

Investigators are executing warrants in Washington state and other parts of the country.

Lakanwal entered the U.S. in 2021 through Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden administration program that resettled Afghans after the U.S. withdrawal, officials said. Lakanwal applied for asylum during that administration, but his asylum was approved this year under the Trump administration, #AfghanEvac said in a statement.

Lakanwal served in a CIA-backed Afghan army unit, known as one of the specialized Zero Units, in the southern province of Kandahar, according to a resident of the eastern province of Khost who identified himself as Lakanwal’s cousin and spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The man said Lakanwal started out working for the unit as a security guard in 2012 and was later promoted to a team leader and a GPS specialist.

Binkley and Finley write for the Associated Press. AP journalists Sarah Brumfield, Siddiqullah Alizai, Elena Becatoros, Randy Herschaft, Cedar Attanasio and Hallie Golden contributed to this report.

The Trump administration is promising an even tougher anti-immigration agenda after an Afghan national was charged this week in the shooting of two National Guard members, with new restrictions targeting the tens of thousands of Afghans resettled in the U.S. and those seeking to come, many of whom served alongside American soldiers in the two-decade war.

But those still waiting to come were already facing stricter measures as part of President Trump’s sweeping crackdown on legal and illegal migration that began when he started his second term in January. And the Afghan immigrants living in the U.S. and now in the administration’s crosshairs were among the most extensively vetted, often undergoing years of security screening, experts and advocates say.

In its latest move, the Trump administration announced Friday that it will pause issuing visas for anyone traveling on an Afghan passport.

The suspected shooter, who worked with the CIA during the Afghanistan war, “was vetted both before he landed, probably once he landed, once he applied for asylum,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute. “But more importantly, he was almost certainly vetted extensively and much more by the CIA.”

Haris Tarin, a former U.S. official who worked on the Biden-era program that resettled Afghans, predicted that “as the investigation unfolds, you will see that this is not a failure of screening. This is a failure of us not being able to integrate — not just foreign intelligence and military personnel — but our own veterans, over the past 25 years.”

The program, Operations Allies Welcome, initially brought about 76,000 Afghans to the United States, many of whom had worked alongside American troops and diplomats as interpreters and translators. The initiative was in place for around a year before shifting to a longer-term program called Operation Enduring Welcome. Almost 200,000 Afghans have been resettled in the U.S. under the programs.

Among those brought to the U.S. under the program was the suspected shooter, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who now faces a first-degree murder charge in the death of 20-year-old Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom. The other National Guard member who was shot, 24-year-old Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remains in critical condition.

Those resettlements are now on hold. The State Department has temporarily stopped issuing visas for all people traveling on Afghan passports, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced late Friday on X.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric

Trump and his allies have seized on the shooting to criticize gaps in the U.S. vetting process and the speed of admissions, even though some Republicans spent the months and years after the 2021 withdrawal criticizing the Biden administration for not moving fast enough to approve some applications from Afghan allies.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Lakanwal “should have never been allowed to come here.” Trump called lax migration policies “the single greatest national security threat facing our nation,” and Vice President JD Vance said Biden’s policy was “opening the floodgate to unvetted Afghan refugees.”

That rhetoric quickly turned into policy announcements, with Trump saying he would “permanently pause all migration” from a list of nearly 20 countries, “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions,” and “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.” Many of these changes had already been set in motion through a series of executive orders over the last 10 months, including most recently in June.

“They are highlighting practices that were already going into place,” said Andrea Flores, a lawyer who was an immigration policy advisor in the Obama and Biden administrations.

Lakanwal applied for asylum during the Biden administration, but his request was approved in April of this year — under the Trump administration — after undergoing a thorough vetting, according to #AfghanEvac, a group that helps resettle Afghans who assisted the U.S. during the war.

Flores said the system has worked across administrations: “You may hear people say, ‘Well, he was granted asylum under Trump. This is Trump’s problem.’ That’s not how our immigration system works. It relies on the same bedding. No asylum laws have really been changed by Congress.”

Afghans in the U.S. fearful for their status

Trump and other U.S. officials have used the attack to demand a reexamination of everyone who came to the U.S. from Afghanistan, a country he called “a hellhole on Earth” on Thursday.

“These policies were already creating widespread disruption and fear among lawfully admitted families. What’s new and deeply troubling is the attempt to retroactively tie all of this to one act of violence in a way that casts suspicion on entire nationalities, including Afghan allies who risked their lives to protect our troops,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, said in a statement Friday.

This has left the nearly 200,000 Afghans living across the U.S. in deep fear and shame over actions attributed to one person. Those in the U.S. are now worrying about their legal status being revoked, while others in the immigration pipeline here and abroad are waiting in limbo.

Nesar, a 22-year-old Afghan who arrived in the U.S. weeks after the fall of Kabul, said he had just begun to assimilate into life in the U.S. when the attack happened Wednesday. He agreed to speak to the Associated Press on condition that only his first name be used for fear of reprisals or targeting by immigration officials.

“Life was finally getting easier for me. I’ve learned to speak English. I found a better job,” he said. “But after this happened two days ago, I honestly went to the grocery store this morning, and I was feeling so uncomfortable among all of those people. I was like, maybe they’re now looking at me the same way as the shooter.”

Two days before the shooting, Nesar and his father, who worked for the Afghan president during the war, had received an interview date of Dec. 13 for their green card application, a moment he said they had been working toward for four years. He says it is now unclear if their application will move forward or whether their interview will take place.

Another Afghan national, who also spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said that after fearing for his life under Taliban rule, he felt a sense of peace and hope when he finally received a special immigrant visa to come to the U.S. two years ago.

He said he thought he could use his experience working as a defense attorney in Afghanistan to contribute to American society. But now, he said, he and other Afghans will once again face scrutiny because of the actions of an “extremist who, despite benefiting from the safety and livelihood provided by this country, ungratefully attacked two American soldiers.”

“It seems that whenever a terrorist commits a crime, its shadow falls upon me simply because I am from Afghanistan,” he added.

Cappelletti and Amiri write for the Associated Press. AP writer Renata Brito contributed to this report.